Variations: Three Korean Poets

by Kim Su-Young, Shin Kyong-Nim, Lee Si-Young

This book showcases the work of three major Korean poets born at fourteen-year intervals, in 1921, 1935, and 1949. Each has tried to renew Korean poetry by bringing it into closer contact with everyday speech, social issues, and ordinary people's lives. Kim Su-Young was a major pioneer, first developing as a Modernist but then moving toward a poetry that addresses social issues and uses ordinary language. Shin Kyong-Nim spent years living among the simple working people of rural Korea. Today Lee Si-Young writes in a similar spirit about the pain and dignity of humble lives. In this bilingual volume, a wide selection of these three poets' most significant work is made available in English for the first time.

328 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2002

Reviews

[Betty · Rating 5 out of 5]

This bilingual anthology in Korean and English consists of a trio of poets of different generations -- Kim Su-Young, Shin Kyong-Nim, and Lee Se-Young; all felt affected by the April 1960 revolution of protests and the succession of despotic Korean leadership, nonmilitary and military. Although the democratic revolution initially failed, it eventually brought democracy to South Korea after a series of autocratic governments.

The poems are a pleasure to read, and the styles are comparable to prose in the form of poetry. Dr. Yoon Jikwan, a president of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, penned the Introduction to the anthology, and a Timeline comprised of the years 1945 from the end of the Japanese colonization of Korea to 1980 puts the critical events into perspective.

[James F · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bilingual anthology of poems by three Korean poets from different generations, Kim Su-Young from the fifties and sixties, Shin Kyong-Nin from the seventies and eighties, and Lee Si-Young from the late seventies into the nineties when this translation was made. I'm not really good at reviewing modern poetry, but some of these poems were very evocative, at least as far as I could tell from the translation. They were mostly short, from a few lines to a couple pages, many featured landscapes and natural phenomena, some were about the ordinary farmers' and workers' lives, and there were also some which were political, about the failed democratic revolutions in South Korea and the sense of sadness and despair over the conditions of the country.